The Ultra Bodies Ultra Species meeting will be held on Wednesday 3 November at 7pm at the Teatro del Castello di Rivoli in the presence of the artist Agnieszka Kurant, the Publisher and Director of 'Flash Art' Gea Politi, the Curator of the Castello di Rivoli Marianna Vecellio and the curator Noam Segal.

Within the Espressioni exhibition which characterizes the Museum's activities in the years 2021-2022, Castello di Rivoli presents the personal project of the conceptual and interdisciplinary artist Agnieszka Kurant (Lódz, Poland, 1978), Crowd Crystal.

The title draws inspiration from the concept of "crowd crystals" that the writer Elias Canetti introduces in the book Massa e Power (1960). In his research, Kurant reflects on the potential inherent in each of us to influence social change within a community, particularly within the digitalized world. The artist analyzes the transformations of the human being and the possible future of work and creativity in our era, questioning the concept of individual authorship and reflecting on the notion of trace, as an actualization of the prehistoric imprint left by our ancestors, which each leaves now in the digital world.

Crowd Crystal consists of evolving installations, paintings and sculptures. The works investigate the impact of collective intelligence phenomena in nature, culture and non-human intelligences – from bacteria and other single-celled organisms to artificial intelligence. The unpublished works on display reflect on the quantification of the expressions of feelings and emotions and on the exploitation of the energies and social capital extracted by predictive algorithms in our contemporary era.

The works in Crowd Crystal physically react to changes in society. The liquid crystal paintings Conversions (Conversions, 2019-2021) use “data mining” to collect the moods of protestors around the world expressed through social media which cause continuous changes in the appearance of the artworks, showing the effects of collective intelligence in contemporary algorithmic and technological society. In Chemical Garden (2021) the artist investigates the relationship between digital, biological and mineral. The work consists of complex plant-like crystalline structures, created through inorganic chemical substances: metal salts – copper, cobalt, manganese, chromium, iron – which are the ingredients of modern computers, the industrial extraction of which leads to the devastation of entire ecosystems . At the same time, chemical gardens in hydrothermal vents on the sea floor are considered a plausible origin of life on earth.